Co-Living – London, UK

2017 – Competition

Shortlisted competition entry to design an innovative co-living development in Forest Gate for the developer Bedu aimed at people who are priced out of the London housing market. Co-Living provides an innovative way to create homes, which are affordable and also promote a strong sense of community. Residents live in a state of interdependence, while maintaining some privacy- they share space, amenities, and services, to maximise resource efficiency and reduce costs. They often have a high-level of involvement in the operation and management of the co-living space.

In our vision, the individual rooms are clustered around communal rooms of different proportions and characters that create dynamic adjacencies and diagonal views. Always seeking the best orientation, these spaces include pockets of greenery in the form of small-scale winter gardens, containing planting that is both ornamental and for food consumption. An ensemble of galleries, loggias and staircases are the main conduits of daylight penetrating deep inside the building, which like an old English country house, is experienced through a sequence of progressively articulated spaces of varying scales that can be distilled into 3 main characters: Chamber, Alcove and Hall.